San Diego State was offered the opportunity to play a football game at Alabama in 2013. It declined. Did it chicken out? Well, if it clucks like a chicken, walks like a chicken and lays eggs like a chicken, it’s not a mongoose.

Turned it down flat. Another Aztecs mistake? Athletic Director Jim Sterk believes not, and he makes a case. But playing the Tide probably didn’t sit well with oddsmakers in the math department, which now oversees the football program.

It’s hard to agree with him, but give Jim credit for the old college try and not crying fowl. To be big time, you must be more than you think you are, which is what the Aztecs want us to believe, when in fact they are not (at least in football).

I went to State when Don Coryell coached and fans loved it when the Aztecs clobbered every stiff on the block. During my matriculation, they went 41-1-1. It would have been 42-1 had it not been for a missed field goal (sound familiar?).

But times do change. Back then, Aztecs Athletic Director Ken Karr would pay teams to give up home games to play in San Diego. Honestly. My junior year, the Aztecs played 10 games, nine at home. But a decade later things began to drift south for the program — the drift lasted close to 30 years — and SDSU dropped into the category of a program willing to play the big boys in their places for guaranteed money.

So, ESPN, which runs collegiate sports out of its treasury, came to SDSU recently and wanted to know if it would be willing to send its football team to Alabama next year, which coincides with State’s first football season in the Big East. Using the excuse that their 2013 pre-conference schedule already is set, the Aztecs declined.

It would have been a nationally televised game. SDSU never has played an SEC team. The payday would have been huge for an athletic program in need of the dough, given California’s continued fiscal impairment.

But not everyone does, and State has a history of not doing so. Look it up.

Outside the Big East, the Aztecs are scheduled to play Eastern Illinois, Utah State, Oregon State and San Jose State. It wouldn’t have been hard to dump Eastern Illinois from the schedule. It’s happened before. It happens everywhere. And the Aztecs have played in many high places for big money, without embarrassing themselves.

If State could go to Tuscaloosa, get a huge check and at least play the Tide tough, it would be decent exposure. And the Aztecs, as they have done in basketball, need one of these. They need a breakthrough win. Beating Oregon State (if they can) will not constitute a breakthrough.

They had a shot at Washington last week against a team close to being ranked, and coach Rocky “Slide Rule” Long dipped into his bag full of mathematical theorems and ran the strangest game plan the school has seen in more than a half-century.

“We’re trying to schedule one BCS (conference) game a year, and next year we already have Oregon State,” Sterk says. “We’re trying to schedule some Pac-12 schools over the next 10 years and not take too many more trips east than we have to once we join the Big East. I suspect we’ll have one or two games back east and I don’t think it’s fair for the kids to go through that again.

“I talked to Rocky about it, and he agreed.”

Rocky probably agreed after rifling through some of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project notes.

I can see Sterk’s reasoning. He’s trying to build a program and a fan base and State has put together some ridiculous schedules in the past. In 2000, it opened with Arizona State, Illinois, Arizona and Oregon State, without a bye. Loss, loss, loss, loss. You get beat up. You finish 3-8.

But this was a chance to play the hottest program in the country. Maybe it meant almost certain defeat and there’s no such thing as a bad win, no such thing as a good loss. But you have to like the challenge, the thrill of the hunt (and in this case, a million clams in a money pool shy of shellfish).

“It’s not that I won’t ever do it,” Sterk says. “But we already have a full schedule. You can over-schedule, and I don’t think that’s a healthy thing to do. It doesn’t mean we’re shying away from somebody.”

Maybe. But it sure looks like a chicken that passed on — at the very least — laying a golden egg.